Another product of Harare's Churchill High School and Takashinga Club, the lanky Maruma started off as a legspinner, before shifting his focus to batting. He became so good at it that he made his Test debut, against Bangladesh in 2013, he opened the batting.

The move up the batting ranks came after a highly successful domestic season in 2012-13, when he averaged 51.80 in 12 innings for Mountaineers, scoring one century and four fifties. That came on the back of two consistent seasons with the bat, in 2011-12 and 2010-11. Most of those runs were scored from No.5 or 6, yet his organised technique and temperament won him a promotion to the top of the order for his Test debut.

Even as his batting improved, Maruma's legspin took a back seat. In 2009-10, he was the leading wicket-taker by some distance in the Logan Cup, the domestic first-class tournament, taking 58 wickets at 18.94. During that period, he was clearly one of the better slow bowlers in Zimbabwe. In the last two seasons before his Test debut (2012-13 and 2011-12), though, he only took 16 wickets from as many matches, as he lost his stock delivery, the legbreak, and started bowling a mixture of googlies and seam-up quicker deliveries.

In the early part of his career, Maruma was seen as a bowling talent. After making his first-class debut against Bangladesh A in 2006, he registered impressive returns in his first Logan Cup, virtually spinning Easterns to the title in partnership with Prosper Utseya. He was rewarded for his outstanding debut domestic season, in which he took 36 wickets at 17.62, with a call up to the national side for the World Twenty20 in South Africa in 2007, but didn't make it into a starting XI. He made his ODI debut against South Africa in the same year, but he struggled to make an impact and fell out of contention, till he began to concentrate on his batting. Liam Brickhill and ESPNcricinfo staff